Texttransformations

The idea about the texttransformation was actually in the beginning somehow a logical one. When working with literature it lies somehow bluntly in front of you.
Also, as our lawyer told us, it could turn out to be a problem, when using the quotes solely and could be seen as copy right infringement. So transforming the text was the first thing to think of.
As it was also the first workshop in this form that we tried out it was hard to prepare something about it. I thought about how to create an abstract picture and stumbled over barcodes.
Barcodes are simply a kind of representation of data and especially within our society also a symbol for repression by goods (thinking of barcodes in a supermarket, that don't actually deal with the product as what it is, but just with the representation of value). There is a pretty famous picture circling within a grass root scene, where a bunch of people break out of a barcode. This is not so stupid as it sounds, as with RFID technology a kind of bar code and the appropriate reader to it was developed that is actually used to get information about people when implemented.
But there are loads of different barcode systems that can be used for different things as well - like with the ISDN barcodes actually loads of data can be received about books, that can be stored in databases and are interesting and important for library databases and therefore point back to a public domain.
I chose the pdf417 barcode - a barcode which can store up to 2.000 ASCII signs - means that it is actually possible to store poems and short stories in a code that can be theoretically read out by a barcode scanner. On top of it the pdf417 code belongs to the Public Domain - so is an open source barcode. For linux there are two programmes with which you can create barcodes and also read them out again. The nice thing with this is actually, that one can rearrange the pixels and create a 'new' poem.

Download the programmes here:
PDF417 decoder
PDF417 encoder